OR/MS Today - December 2000

December 2000

INFORMS News

Dantzig Dissertation Honorees Tackle Relevant Problems

Shabbir Ahmed, whose research involves optimization under uncertainty with application to strategic planning, received first-place honors from the Dantzig Dissertation Award Committee. The Dantzig Award is given to the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. Committee chair Zelda Zabinksy made the presentation at the INFORMS meeting in San Antonio.

Ahmed, who completed both his master's and Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Professor Nikolaos Sahinidi, is now an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The committee cited Ahmed for developing an approximation technique that provides a practical and fast answer to a specific planning problem at IBM involving hundreds of millions of dollars a year in tool purchases. The citation noted that Ahmed's technique "makes a strong contribution to stochastic integer programming that Š will find applications to all levels of strategic planning, facility location, airline scheduling and supply chain distribution."

Prashant Fuloria, a product manager at Closedloop Solutions, Inc., who completed his Ph.D. under the guidance of Professor Stefanos Zenios at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, finished second in the competition. Fuloria's research "tackles some controversial issues in the health care delivery system relating financial incentives to the operational delivery of health care."

Vinayak Deshpande, Terry Taylor and Kirk Yost received honorable mention.

Deshpande is an assistant professor at Purdue University. He completed his Ph.D. at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, under the joint supervision of Professors Morris Cohen and Karen Donohue. Deshpande's research is "relevant to supply chain management, but was focused on military weapons systems instead of the private sector."

Taylor is the director of Research for the Global Supply Chain Management Forum at Stanford University, after completing his Ph.D. from the Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Department at Stanford University, supervised by Professor Hau Lee. Taylor's accolades are numerous and include a special fellowship, "Future Professor in Manufacturing." A pressing issue at Hewlett Packard regarding channel policies throughout HP's industrial supply chain motivated Taylor's research.

Yost is an officer in the United States Air Force and performed his Ph.D. work under the guidance of Professor Alan Washburn at the Naval Post Graduate School. Yost developed a new technique to optimize with imperfect information, combining linear programming with partially observable Markov decision processes.

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